Deadly Appearances (13 page)

“Joanne, let me help you with this book. You know all the people, and you’re here, but I don’t think that will be enough for this job. You’ve been around politics long enough to know how far the biography of a prairie politician will go in this country if there’s not a familiar name attached to it. And I can offer you something more concrete than a name on a dust jacket. I’m not without resources, contacts, file footage. A project like this can be easy or it can be difficult. I have access to the kinds of things that can make it easy. Let me help.”

I was astounded, and I said so. Finally, I asked the question that needed answering. “Rick, what’s in it for you? I know that’s crudely worded, but why would you want to be part of this?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure that I know myself. But I think it has something to do with discharging a debt.”

For me, that was exactly the right answer.

“Rick, let’s have a glass of brandy and drink to Andy’s book, to
our
book. I have a bottle of something really special that Andy bought for my husband the last Christmas Ian was alive. I’ve been waiting for an occasion, and I think we are occasion enough. Come on. Let’s go over to the granny flat and we’ll open that bottle.”

“Sounds great, but what in God’s name is a granny flat?”

“You’re looking at it. It’s that apartment on top of the garage. I use it for an office.” I reached for his arm. “Come on. It’s easier to show you than tell you.”

He followed me through the dark garden and up the wooden staircase that led to the little balcony outside the door of the flat.

“Should I carry you over the threshold?” he said.

“I don’t think it’s that kind of collaboration,” I said, turning the key in the lock.

When the door opened, we were met by an arctic blast of cold air. I was annoyed at myself.

“Damn, no one’s been in here since the morning of the funeral, and the air conditioner’s been on high all that time.”

“It’s certainly efficient,” said Rick, rubbing his hands.

“No more than most. I guess this place is just sealed up so tight it seems that way. Anyway, here’s the cognac. Look at the label. Andy was always a generous man. And here are the glasses, but let’s take our drinks out on the balcony. It’s freezing in here.”

Rick poured and we stood on that ridiculous little balcony and looked at one another in the moonlight.

“Here’s to Andy Boychuk,” he said for the second time that evening.

“To Andy and to sane minds and souls that aren’t mad,” I said, and I sipped and felt the heat of the cognac spread through my veins.

In the morning I picked him up at his hotel and drove him to the airport. He wouldn’t let me get out of the car. “An airport is a grim place to say good-bye,” he said and he reached out and traced the lines of my cheekbones with his fingertips. When finally he spoke, his voice was husky. “I’ll call you tonight.”

He did, and he called many nights afterward. The thing to remember about my relationship with Rick Spenser is that he came at the right time in my life.

CHAPTER

9

The word “bittersweet” is not part of my working vocabulary, but that’s the word that seemed to hang in the air that week as my daughter was getting ready to go to university. From the day she was born I had dreaded the day Mieka would go away to school, but suddenly, that September, her going seemed not just inevitable but right.

My relationship with my mother had always been so uneasy that I’d worried about how I’d be with a daughter. Mieka made it easy. From the first day she was level and sunny, and she had grown into a confident and optimistic woman. She has had her share of sadness and often more than her share of responsibility. In the months after Ian died, I had leaned on all the children but, because she was the oldest, I had leaned on her most. On the black days when I would awaken so tired and dispirited that all I could do was turn over in bed and watch the morning light on the wallpaper, it was Mieka, cheery and practical, who would get the boys off to school and run in with a cup of coffee for me before she caught her bus to high school. I’m not proud of that time, but it’s there. And Mieka didn’t need a rerun.

That September was her time to move into a place of her own and cook and go to classes and do laundry and dream dreams. She had genuinely liked Andy, but she was not yet nineteen, and he had been peripheral to her life. She was sad he was dead, and she was sensitive to my grief, but a new part of her life was going to begin in less than a week, and she was bright with joy.

Because I loved her, I was happy for her. But as I stood and watched my daughter earnestly compare guarantees on toaster ovens and look critically at no-iron sheets, it was hard not to feel a sense of loss – not just of her, but of me.

It had been twenty-eight years since I’d carried my suitcase up to the third floor of the house opposite Victoria College at the University of Toronto. And it was a quarter of a century since I’d invited my seminar group in political science to my flat on Charles Street for dinner, and we’d eaten spaghetti and drunk Italian wine out of fat bottles in straw baskets and argued all night about the meaning of
Last Year at Marienbad
and the philosophy of Ayn Rand. That was the year I met Ian. On our first date he took me to dinner at his logic professor’s house in north Toronto. The logic professor, who was smug and reputedly brilliant, was in his late thirties. His wife, whose name was Betsy, was twenty-one, like me, but she already had three little children. Her father had been a mathematician at
MIT
, and the logic professor had married her when she was sixteen, so he could, he said, “help her grow.” Besides the children, Betsy had two cocker spaniels. She called one Professor and one Wife.

It was winter but a beautiful starry night, and Ian and I walked home miles along Yonge Street. I held his arm, and even through his heavy winter coat, I felt a sexual charge. I knew that night I wanted to marry him, but not the rest, not Betsy’s hot domestic world of babies and dogs and casseroles out of the
Good Housekeeping Cookbook
. We would be different, Ian and I – twin stars, separate and brilliant and eternal … We would be different …

And now it was Mieka’s time to turn the key of the door of her first private home, to cook her own suppers for friends, to make her own choices, and I knew how I would miss these two: that daughter of mine, that younger me.

That week wasn’t all elegiac. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and our party had, for ten days, been without a leader. In politics, you do what you have to do. Once when our party was in deep financial waters, I went to a funeral where the best friend of the dead man stood outside the funeral chapel with a fried-chicken bucket and took up a collection for the party. No one was shocked. Even the widow wrote him a handsome cheque before she left for the cemetery. Life goes on.

I was not surprised that the person who came to ask my support was Craig Evanson – “that floppy man,” Peter had called him once when he was little, and in our family, the name stuck.

Craig Evanson
was
a floppy man. Tall and shambling, his body was as loose-limbed as his wife’s was clockwork tight. I had always liked Craig, and on Wednesday morning, when I came to the door, barefoot and without makeup, and saw him kneeling there talking to my dogs through the screen door, I remembered why.

He was always full of hope, even now when, in my eyes at least, his life had turned out badly. He had wanted three things. I knew this because years before when our children were small, Craig had told me what he wanted. That was the kind of dopey, ingenuous thing he was always doing. He said he wanted to be close to his wife and son, to have friends to talk law with and drink with, and he wanted to serve as the member for Regina–Little Flower till he was sixty-five years old and could retire and write his memoirs. It was, I guess, not much to want from life.

They were modest dreams, but Julie Evanson had undercut them all. Her love for their son, at first so consuming and then so conditional, had driven Mark away in confusion. Her ambition had coarsened Craig’s relationship with his friends, and her need to make Craig leader of the party had jeopardized his seat in Little Flower. She had made her husband’s name synonymous with all those terms we smirk over: wimpy, spineless, henpecked. She had made him into a joke, but as I saw him with the golden September light behind him, bending to soothe my dogs with his words, it was hard not to feel the old tug of affection.

He was so happy to see me, so grateful to be invited to stay for coffee. And as we sat in the middle of the chaos of Mieka’s packing and talked about our children it was like the old easy days. I told him I’d spent a little time with Mark and Lori and had seen their baby, and it was as if someone had thrown a switch inside him. We talked about Mark’s gentleness and Lori’s beauty and the baby’s brightness, and Craig glowed with happiness. Then, suddenly, the switch was shut off.

“You know that Julie thinks Mark has betrayed her,” he said.

We sat in awkward silence. Even her name was enough to take the shine from the morning. Finally, he shook himself like an old dog. “Anyway, Jo, I’m here for a reason, and you know what it is. I’m running for leader. If you’re committed elsewhere, or you want to wait and see who else announces, that’s okay. I just want to be considered.”

“You’ll be considered.” I tried to sound gentle.

“But not for long and not seriously,” he said flatly.

“Craig …” I tried to find a way to take the sting out of turning him down. “You’re such a good constituency man – everybody says you’re the best. It’s just that you know how tight and how dirty this election’s going to be. I think we need someone …”

“Smarter.” He supplied the word for me.

I didn’t say anything.

“God damn it, Jo. After all these years, that hurts. I wish Andy hadn’t given that last interview. It just about killed Julie.” He looked at his watch. “Well, I should be getting home.” He stood up – the floppy man making his exit. “Thanks for the coffee and the talk.”

Sad and embarrassed, I walked him to the door. He started to leave, then he turned.

“I can’t disappoint her again, Jo.”

“I know that, Craig.”

“She’s given up everything for me,” he said simply, then he went down the walk, got in his car and headed home to a marriage that I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

The story has a postscript. The next morning, after we finally got everything loaded in Howard’s van, I ran into the house to get my sunglasses. The phone was ringing. I was going to leave it. Then I worried that it might be some problem with the boys or maybe with the college kid I’d hired to stay with them while I was in Saskatoon. But it was a woman’s voice.

“Don’t stand in his way, Jo. Craig might not be tough, but I am.” Then her humourless laugh and she hung up. So he had told her.

When I got in the van, Mieka said, “Mummy, you’re white as a ghost.”

“Nothing, just a nasty telephone call.”

“A crank caller?” asked Mieka, all concern.

“No, sweetie. Remember Mark Evanson? Well, it was his mother, Julie.” I put on my sunglasses. “I think Julie is about ready to start her own coven.”

Mieka smiled, but Howard didn’t. “Be careful around her, Jo. She’s got a wicked temper.”

“I’ll be careful, Howard. Now come on, old man, let’s get this show on the road.”

Mieka, house-proud, didn’t want to eat with us. Her new place was a two-storey frame house on Ninth Street. She and her boyfriend had come up earlier in the summer and rented it from a woman who was spending a year in Dublin studying Lady Gregory. It looked perfect to me when we opened the door, and more perfect after we’d spent the afternoon switching furniture around and unpacking Mieka’s stuff. But my daughter is not me. She said she wouldn’t enjoy dinner when she knew that things “at home” – and she used the word “home” to describe the house on Ninth Street – weren’t quite right yet. So she waved Howard and me off, told us to have fun and invited us for a spaghetti dinner the next day before we drove back to Regina.

“So,” I said standing on the sidewalk in front of my daughter’s new home, “are you ready to take a brokenhearted mother out for dinner?”

“You’ll love this place,” said Howard.

“I’ll bet it has leather menus,” I said.

Howard looked off in the distance thoughtfully. “You know, I believe it does.”

Howard is not adventurous when it comes to food. Years ago a nouvelle cuisine place opened in town, and Ian and I dragged Howard there between meetings. He’d eaten without complaint, but his despair as he searched the menu for something more substantial than slivers of sole had been palpable. Since then I had let him pick the restaurant, and we always went to places where the beef was cut thick, and the bar Scotch was top of the line.

Tonight, as we drove to the west side, he said, “You’ll like this place, Jo. They grow their own vegetables.”

“Do they rope their own steers, too?”

Howard snorted. “No wonder Mieka’s glad to get rid of you for the evening.”

The Hearth did turn out to be a very good restaurant – lots of oak and dark leather and candlelight and a big functioning fireplace, which felt good on a cool September night. The waiter brought the menus, and Howard ordered a double Glenfiddich on the rocks. I ordered vermouth with a twist, and when our drinks arrived, Howard took a long, satisfied pull on his Scotch and settled back in his leather chair.

“Well, how are you doing?” he said.

“Okay, I guess, but I don’t want to talk about me, I want to talk about Andy.”

“I’ve got no problem with that.”

“You know, the police have that portfolio Andy always used for his speaking notes – the blue leather one with –”

“ ‘Every Ukrainian Mother’s Dream’ on it in gold.” Howard finished the sentence and smiled.

“Millard found a poem in there. It wasn’t there earlier, I know, because I checked the speech just before Andy went on the stage. Someone had copied out William Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’ – it’s pretty standard stuff, I think, on most freshman English courses. Anyway it was beautifully written in calligraphy – is that redundant? At the top were two letters – initials maybe –
A
and E, and they were joined by a bunch of little curlicues like the initials of the bride and groom on a wedding invitation. I can’t get those initials out of my mind.”